Workers at Hyatt Hotels have asked patrons to boycott their workplaces. In conjunction with a group of religious scholars supportive of labor rights, they have addressed a special plea to participants in AAR/SBL to boycott the Hyatt McCormick Place and Hyatt Regency in conjunction with the conference. They’re asking attendees not to stay at, eat, or attend panels or interviews at those two hotels.

A petition you can sign at the link above will be delivered to the AAR and SBL Boards of Directors in advance of the conference. A strong, early show of support from scholars affiliated with the organizations will allow them to pull conference events from Hyatt early, and prevent them from forcing attendees to choose between attending events and respecting picket lines.

In Chicago, Hyatt has refused to adopt the contract that other major hotels abide by. Nationally, the boycott against Hyatt is based around their use of exploitative subcontracting arrangements, poor working conditions for housekeepers (and lobbying to prevent regulatory improvements), and other reasons explained here.

I have worked alongside the UNITE HERE union in many capacities, as an organizer in my first post-college job, as an ally when I was in local government, and as a member in my college dining hall. In the labor movement at large they are passionate advocates, tactical innovators, and well known for empowering workers as leaders in the union structure and as a “countervailing force” within their own workplaces. I have complained in other venues about dumbboycotts, but this is a principled and effective use of the tactic. (It’s notable, and common to boycotts led by this union, that they are called by workers in the hotels, who go into it knowing that reduced business means short-term sacrifice of their hours and tips in exchange for long-term strength.)

It’s by comment-section felicity that I ended up connected to this community, and I’m grateful to have the soapbox to connect something personally important to me to you. Please sign the pledge and help persuade AAR/SBL to move its conference business out of Hyatt.

Recently I was engaged by a thought: is there any necessary correlation between Christ’s injunction to spread the gospel and conversion/admission into a singular community of believers? Now, obviously, communities of faith did emerge — and perhaps it could even be said that, practically speaking, they inevitably emerge — but the fact that the gospel (edit: would appear to) precedes the community seems significant to me.

I read most of the New Testament in terms of purposiveness: namely, that the purpose of the church, and thus the sum total of Christian activity, is the advancement of the gospel. E.g., on the one hand, if this means women must keep their heads covered and stay silent in one community, do it; but on the other hand, if this means women must serve crucial and vocal leadership roles in another community, do it. Really, the only operative rule is by any means necessary. (For this reason, Paul can even say in Philippians 1.18 that the motivations of false preachers doesn’t matter, as long as the gospel itself is advanced.) The community that emerges seems ultimately incidental, and perhaps even wholly contingent on how, to whom, and where the gospel is spread.

By this I’m not trying to simply reiterate contextual theology. Even there, there is still a singular community — it’s just dressed up differently from place to place/people to people. Is there, though, warrant to privilege a singular community’s role vis-à-vis the gospel. Of course, it can be said that any such community embodies the gospel, and to that extent it is important, but why the assumption that the gospel has but one potential body? This seems the case only if the gospel is strictly a determinate, content-laden message. If the gospel that is spread, however, is more precisely in line with the Prophets, and as such is a radical call to and empowerment for universal justice, wherein those who are most low are brought most high, the ecclesial embodiment would seem to require more than just contextual and cosmetic differences — indeed more even than the infinite expansiveness of some abstract or spirtual concept (i.e., “the Church”) — but outright multiplicity.

What we would have, then, are communities of faith, whose participants are converted by and to the advancement of the gospel. In this way, they do not become members of or appendage to the “the Body,” but rather themselves become physical embodiments of the gospel. It is my conjecture that some embodiments will look more alike than others, in which case communal embodiments may well emerge — but at other times, their interests may very well appear opposed. (Is it possible, one wonders, that they might even truly be opposed or contradictory?) In either case, this is where my thought took me, and where it remains, and where I leave it here, in a world of multiple embodiments of the gospel, would they not (these embodiments) then be subject to the same physical principles as any other body: that of emergence, evolutionary organization & adaptation, decay & dissolution, etc.?